Make a mechanical hand with plastic drinking straws

Intro and Materials

Instructable user mszymczak has let us share his project with you for building a mechanical hand with plastic drinking straws. This project is a great primer for kids to spark their interest in building more complicated gadgets. First comes a drinking straw hand, next comes a Raspberry Pi robot.

Mszymczak says, "The elegance of this design is that it is basically free and the assembly is pretty simple. Yet, this design achieves fully mechanical hand that rebounds back to its original state when the tendons release their tension.

For this project, the goal was to build a fully functional hand using only straws...The magic of this project is that it uses no glue, welding, staples or securing other than by creative use of the source building material. Straws are incredible building materials. They come in a wide variety of dimensions but share inherent strength, flexibility, and availability attributes."